⚠️ Content Warning
This entry contains trauma-related reflections, emotional distress, and descriptions of trauma responses.
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Writing trauma is hard. That’s the truth. Not just because of what happened, but because of what it still does to me.
Each time I try to put words to it—real, raw, honest words—I feel my heart race. My stomach tightens. I start to shake, sometimes cry. Sometimes I freeze. And sometimes I feel like I’m outside my own body watching it all spill out like a movie I never asked to star in. It's weird how life is staring at my hand, telling myself this is real, or could it be? We watch people on TV. Maybe I am the one on a TV show. A story I never agreed to carry.
Because I didn’t choose this. I didn’t choose to be born into chaos. I didn’t choose to be taken, rejected, hurt, controlled, or silenced. I didn’t choose the systems that failed me or the people who were supposed to protect me and didn’t. But here I am, still writing, still breathing, still surviving.
That’s the cost of survival. It’s not just living through the moment—it’s what keeps echoing after. The aftershocks. The panic in the grocery store when someone walks too close behind me. The way I can’t sit with my back to a door. The way I scan every room automatically. It’s gotten better since I’ve had Wyman, because I know he watches over me, but the tension doesn’t always leave—even when he’s there. And especially when he’s not.
Survival made me grow up too fast. It made me smart and guarded and aware—but it also made me afraid, constantly bracing. It taught me how to keep going, but not how to feel safe.
And now, when I write, I feel like I’m opening a vault that’s been chained shut for decades. I never wanted to look too closely at it. But I know I have to. Because the only way to stop carrying all this pain in silence is to speak it. Even when my voice shakes. Even when my hands tremble over the keyboard.
Some people think writing is easy. That journaling is just scribbling thoughts. But when your thoughts are soaked in trauma, writing is war. It’s a battle between the part of me that wants to heal and the part that still thinks remembering might kill me.
And yet, here I am. Choosing to write anyway.
Because I believe my truth matters. Because I want to get better. Because maybe if I speak this, someone else will know they’re not alone. That they’re not crazy. Their trauma responses make sense when you know what they’ve been through.
I’m trying. And some days that doesn’t feel like enough. But I know now it is.
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you… when you walk through the fire, you will not be burned.”
- Isaiah 43:2
The In-Between
I’ve always found it strange being alive.
Being able to move freely, run, breathe, and just exist.
Not in a fearful way—just this deep, quiet awareness that never really leaves me.
Like… how is this real?
I remember as a child, I would look at my hands and just stare at them—or watch the trees and roads pass by while my mother drove.
Not because something was wrong—but because something felt off.
Like I was aware of myself in a way I couldn’t explain.
Almost like I was watching myself live, instead of just living.
And sometimes I would wonder…
We sit and watch people on TV, watching their lives unfold from the outside.
What if it’s something like that—but with God?
Not in a distant way… but in a knowing way.
Like He sees everything, understands everything, watches over it all—while we’re inside it, trying to make sense of it moment by moment.
It created this feeling in me that I didn’t have words for back then.
A kind of awareness that made life feel both real and unreal at the same time.
Like I was here…
but also stepping outside of it, just enough to question it.
Even now, I still have moments where I pause and feel it again.
That same quiet wondering.
That same sense of something deeper just beneath the surface of everything.
I don’t think it’s something I fully understand yet.
But I don’t think it’s something I’m meant to ignore either.
Maybe it’s not confusion.
Maybe it’s awareness.
Maybe it’s the part of me that’s always searching—for meaning, for truth, for God in the middle of it all.